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The NFL: Everything’s Fine, Just Fine

GOODELL: Let’s get this thing started. I have to be uptown at the Youth Football Awards Luncheon. We’re giving them $500 and a Peyton Manning jersey to their concussion prevention awareness campaign. What’s on the docket this week?

JOHNSON: Odell Beckham made the list again. He was penalized for an end zone dance when he cradled the football like a baby and pretended to sing to it. Two of the other players stood next to him and pretended to shush the crowd.

GOODELL: Ha, Odell cracks me up. Fine him five thousand dollars.

JOHNSON: Except the next time he scored, he held the ball but pretended he was crying. Some of the sports pundits claimed he was making fun of the league’s anti-celebration stance.

GOODELL: Like who?

JOHNSON: Well, Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith.

GOODELL: Those guys are a-holes, but they shout a lot, so they must be right. Five thousand for the first one, and then $15,000 for the second for denigrating the league.

JOHNSON: We also had a questionable call against Cody Kessler, the Browns’ quarterback. The Bengals’ defensive end, Carlos Dunlap, threw him to the turf. The Browns’ fans were livid on social media.

GOODELL: What kind of social media reach do the Browns have?

JOHNSON: Remember the opening crowd shots in the movie, Major League, when it was just the four fans?

GOODELL: Yeah.

JOHNSON: Like that.

GOODELL: Ah, good. Is Kessler a marquee player?

JOHNSON: No, but he did leave the game with a concussion.

GOODELL: No fine. Speaking of marquee players, was Tom Brady involved in anything?

JOHNSON: Well, one of the Steelers taunted him when he sacked Brady, but that was it.

GOODELL: Find that guy and fine him $20,000, and send Brady a fruit basket.

JOHNSON: One of the Colts’ third-string linebackers wants to commemorate his grandfather, who died heroically saving 30 orphans and puppies from a burning building, all while shielding the American flag with his body and filing a legal motion to prevent illegal dumping of toxic chemicals in a community swimming pool. He wants to wear a small patch at next week’s game.

GOODELL: No way. That will interfere with our Reebok sponsorship.

JOHNSON: Keep in mind, this is actually a one inch patch that will be worn underneath his jersey where it won’t be seen by anyone at all.

GOODELL: Hell no. Send the lawyers to the locker room to personally seize the patch and set fire to it. And then fine him $10,000 dollars for even asking.

JOHNSON: We’ve got a lot more players kneeling during the national anthem.

GOODELL: Well, we still don’t have a clear majority opinion in this country. NFL Opinion Research said Facebook is pretty evenly split on it, so we’ll leave that one alone until we’ve got a clear and definitive winner.

JOHNSON: A lot of fans believe Colin Kaepernick should be fired, have his salary stripped, and have his life completely ruined because he won’t stand. Some of the owners are even saying it.

GOODELL: Yeah, but it’s a freedom of expression issue, and we can’t be seen as oppressing the rights and expression of our players. They’ve got just as many rights as everyone else.

GOODELL and JOHNSON both laugh.

GOODELL: Oh man, I almost said that with a straight face. Look, fans are going to be upset either way, but most of them don’t buy tickets or jerseys. And the ones who keep buying Kaepernick’s jerseys are setting fire to them, so we still make money. Either way, I’m glad the NFL is being seen as leading the charge for open and frank discussion about this one small issue. It makes people stop talking about Tom Brady.

JOHNSON: And finally, Josh Brown the Giants’ punter, is back in the news. There are new reports that he has been abusive to his wife over 20 times over the years.

GOODELL: Didn’t we suspend him for a game earlier this year for this?

JOHNSON: Yes, back in August.

GOODELL: The whole game?

JOHNSON: Absolutely.

GOODELL: Huh. And that wasn’t enough for people?

JOHNSON: Apparently not. Many of our female fans are screaming for blood. Even our male fans are accusing us of being insensitive to domestic violence.

It is not, for the love of GOD, people, the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I swear, if anyone says Monty Python is "dry humor" is going to get a smack.

Here are some other types of comedy you may have heard and are just tossing around, willy-nilly.

Farce: Exaggerated comedy. Characters in a farce get themselves in an unlikely or improbable situation that takes a lot of footwork and fast talking to get out of. The play "The Foreigner" is an example of a farce, as are many of the Jeeves &…

See, you're already doing it. I can't even say four words without you opening your mouth and well-actuallying all over everything.

What is wrong with you, Well Actually Guy? How did you become that one annoying guy on Facebook who responds to every opinion with "Well, actually. . ."

"Well, actually" you'll explain the punchlines of jokes.

"Well, actually," you'll argue about a single statistic in a news article for hours.

Well Actually Guy likes to point out when things are technically correct, even though those details are not important to the discussion. In fact, Well Actually Guy likes to throw in these minor technical corrections as a way to derail a story, or call an entire philosophical argument into question.

We should call it "wagging," or use the hashtag #WAG. As in, "Did you just #WAG me?"

Did you get that? It's an acronym. Web slang. It's how all the teens and young people are texting with their tweeters and Facer-books on their cellular doodads.

It stands for "The FBI has created an eighty-eight page Twitter slang dictionary."

See, you would have known that if you had the FBI's 88 page Twitter slang dictionary.

Eighty-eight pages! Of slang! AYFKMWTS?! (Are you f***ing kidding me with this s***?! That's actually how they spell it in the guide, asterisks and everything. You know, in case the gun-toting agents who catch mobsters and international terrorists get offended by salty language.)

I didn't even know there were 88 Twitter acronyms, let alone enough acronyms to fill 88 pieces of paper.

The FBI needs to be good at Twitter because they're reading everyone's tweets to see if anyone is planning any illegal activities. Because that's what terrorists do — plan their terroristic activities publicly, as if they were…